"If you're making $300k a year, you have more in common with someone making minimum wage than you do with Elon [Musk, the founder of Tesla and other corporations]. There are people that walk among us that have so much wealth, that even generations of mismanagement can't squander it. These folks you speak of are not those folks."
It's almost as if they are a slightly different class, but still not the bourgeoisie? It's almost as though Marx talked about this...
What would constitute petit bougs in today's western economies though? Is it every high paying job?
definitely not. you can get paid 120k in san francisco and LA and still live paycheck to paycheck unironically because of how expensive housing is there. 150-200k would be in the comfortable range, as insane as that is
ultimately, passive income is what defines your class character. workers that own their own house and nice things are the same as workers that do not have those things. its just workers without those are overexploited in comparison to the rich worker's exploitation lite. a landlord makes money passively, a small business tyrant makes money passively, someone with a ton of stocks makes it passively (and im not just talking about hedging against inflation), and so on. its easier for these richer workers to accrue money to get passive income, but that doesnt necessarily mean they have it.
And even on that note, most of the true movers of the markets are not those former or current workers. You can have 10 million in the stock market and still be completely subjected to the whims of capitalists. You're going to be better off and mostly secure, but your ability to manipulate the stock market is basically non-existent. That being said, if they are using that money to manipulate their local or forgien markets, then they are into petite-boug territory. But passive income is a better marker.
I always situate the conversation around control of the market, rather than anything else.
id say having 10 million in the stock market, S&P is usually at around 5-10.5% returns. that means youre accruing a million, more or less, each year. sure, its petit booj, but lets not kid ourselves by calling them a worker
There are plenty of guys who started their careers engineering in the 80's for whom this is the case, due to the enourmous inflation of the markets. They are still workers whose labor value has likely been extracted. Likely not close to the rate of the factory workers who actually executed their designs, but saying they are in the same class as even C-suite people, let alone owners is absurd. Are they likely to side with workers when the revolution comes? Not really. But are they workers whose primary generated income was the exchange of labor? Yes. They are some other class, idk what to call them though I guess the moniker is PMC, though I'd hesitate to call most engineers managers.
Interestingly enough, it's these kinds of people who are mostly in charge of running China atm.
Edit: So are they our enemy? Yes, but not really. They are easily paid off if you actually are able to sieze the means of production, and they are unlikely to fight you, but they will probably be passive aggressive dicks about the whole thing.
possibly dumb and granular, but honest question: what about those in sinecure type of positions? like the true, high income bullshit job. i'm thinking of dean and above level positions in the academy, nepotism-style no show non profit/foundation jobbery, VP of whatever at a fortune 500, paid board seats, etc.
my heart tells me those are passive income with a varyingly thin veneers of of working class character.
It's not an income thing.
Like most of what Marx wrote about it's defined by your relationship to your means of production.
If you own other people's means of production and live by profiting off the gap between the value they produce and what you pay them you're bourgeois.
If you do not own your means of production and are paid a wage to work you're working class.
If you own your means of production but don't employ anyone else to work it (ie, a freelance contractor or independent shopkeeper) then you're petit-bourgeois.
I think the term you're looking for is "labour aristocracy", which was coined by Engels to describe the upper section of the working class who receive high enough wages it can act as a bribe that causes them to betray their class interests.
Lenin extended the argument to say that these wages and the lifestyle labour aristocracy lives is dependent on the profits of imperialism to be sustained, and knowing this they actually have reactionary class interests opposed to the vast majority of workers.